VisitCounter

VisitCounter is a gem which solves the annoying problem of counting visits and displaying them in real time. In an SQL database, for a site with a lot of hits, this can cause quite a lot of overhead. VisitCounter aims to solve this by using a quick key-value store to keep a delta, and only persist to the SQL DB when the delta crosses a certain percent of the saved counter. It can be used transparently, by overriding the accessor to the counter, or simply by using the helper functions it defines - incr_counter, read_counter, get_counter_delta and nullify_counter.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'visit-counter'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install visit-counter

a. the default storage engine is redis. If you have a global $redis for your redis connection, we default to using that. Otherwise, or if you want to specify a different connection, in an initializer you should define it by:

VisitCounter::Store::RedisStore.redis = Redis.new(host: "your_redis_host", port: port)

b. in the class you wish to have a visit counter simply declare include VisitCounter from this moment on, you can use the incr_counter(:counter_name), nullify_counter(:counter_name) and read_counter(:counter_name) methods You can also do something like this:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
   include VisitCounter
   cached_counter :counter_name
end

this will override the counter_name method to read the live counter (from both database and the NoSQL storage) and add a increase_counter_name method for upping the counter by 1 (in the NoSQL and/or persist to DB when needed)

##Thresholds

the default behaviour of visit counter is that once the visits pass 30% of the staged number, the visit counter stages the changes and nullifies the delta. You can, however, tweak that method. including VisitCounter in a class creates two class attribute_accessors, one named visit_counter_threshold_method, the other visit_counter_threshold. visit_counter_threshold_method accepts either :static or :percent (the default), the threshold is either the decimal percent (0.1 for 10%) or an integer for :static. in case of the :static method you will percist to the DB once every (threshold) times the counter goes up.

so you might want to do something like that:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
   include VisitCounter
   cached_counter :counter_name
   self.visit_counter_threshold_method = :static
   self.visit_counter_threshold = 100
end

if you want the counter to persist to database once every 100 views.

if you need to run callbacks for whatever reason after you update the counter just:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base include VisitCounter cached_counter :counter_name self.persist_with_callbacks = true end

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request